Austin

“[Martians] never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: "In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of
things I happen to see." A Martian, far cleverer, would say: “This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution